What are the advantages of WordPress websites?

If you are running your own business, a website is a significant part of your marketing strategy. WordPress allows you to create, update and manage with ease your own website. This might sound appealing to you, especially when you know some interesting facts about WordPress:

WordPress started out as a very popular blogging tool, but today, it has grown into a full blown content management system (CMS).

There are more than 74 million users of WordPress all over the world and that number is significantly growing everyday.

WordPress is a free, open source framework.

WordPress powers over one-sixth of all the websites globally. (See some more impressive stats)

WordPress is built and supported by volunteers. WordPress is continuously improved everyday by hundreds of people all over the globe.

On Google, more than 30 million WordPress related searches are made each month.

Functionality and security are two important things WordPress regularly and continuously improves.

WordPress caters to the needs of online visitors worldwide. It has been localized and translated into more than 73 languages.

WordPress allows you to build practically limitless websites. It offers thousands of free or paid plugins, themes and widgets to its users.

Ease of Use

WordPress looks and feels like a familiar word processor. Sweet!

If you’ve never used WordPress before, you will appreciate its ease of use. If you’re remotely familiar with your average word processing program, WordPress will be rather familiar. You don’t need to have a programmer or designer to manage your site. When it comes to administration, WordPress is much easier to use compared to any of its competitors. It offers a very intuitive interface. Content adding is simple and quick and installing plugins are simply effortless. You don’t need that much exposure or experience to learn it.

WordPress is also Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly. WordPress websites have code that are consistent and streamlined, which Google can easily index. WordPress offers several search engine-friendly principles and techniques. It also offers plugins and customizations that will further allow or increase SEO.

There are a lot of plugins available for WordPress. These plugins offer functionality for almost everything you have in mind: Want to build a customized contact form? Check. Whip up a slick looking video gallery? Can do. Want to start up your ecommerce website? Easily done. Integrate your social media in one place? Boom. Plugins let you customize your site with just a click of a button. And a lot of these plugins are absolutely free.

Another significant benefit of using WordPress is that it is self-updating. It has a feature that notifies you when there is an available upgrade for your WordPress software or the plugins. Upgrades involve very little effort and involve a one-click process.

Although WordPress does not have dedicated technical support for users, there is a lot of available online help for you, like at WordPress.org on their discussion boards. There are also websites that offer help to those who are experiencing problems with the software.

With all these features, nothing can compare to what WordPress has to offer. It’s not complicated to start with, It doesn’t require expertise for operation, and most of all, it can provide for most of your needs.

What’s the Catch?

If it’s so easy to use, why aren’t more people working on their own websites? Yes, the framework and the tools are mostly free, but your website will eventually have to live somewhere (a hosting service), you still need to provide the content, and most importantly, just because something is relatively easy to use, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it well.

The difference between the dabbler, the hobbyist, and a professional website designer & developer, is understanding that building a website isn’t solely about putting content up. It’s about how that content will be delivered to the end-user. That’s the not-so-obvious part of website design. So although the tool (WordPress) is freely available to use, the way one uses it sometimes requires more expertise.

It’s like this: A baseball bat is relatively inexpensive. Most of us will not be pulling down six figures swinging one. The professional baseball player can make a lot of money swinging around the same bat. It’s all about the how.

We at ZingMap encourage people to learn about WordPress—about how it’s easy to use, to edit websites with it, and how flexible it is. We even encourage the fearless to play around with it. The main challenge with WordPress as a tool is that it almost offer up too many choices. As a result, many people get stuck as to how their website should look and function. That’s where we come in!

Is WordPress Right for Me?

As we said before, WordPress is powering 1/6th of the world’s websites. It’s solid, easy to use, and there’s a lot of functionality you can add to your website with it. Here at ZingMap, we only develop WordPress websites because of its power and flexibility. Odds are it will be the right fit for you. There are other technologies out there that offer some unique solutions, but we have had a great deal of success providing websites for clients with a very wide variety of needs just by implementing WordPress in alignment with best practices. Take a look at some of the sites we’ve built and see for yourself!